Build a Memory, Not an Ad
Shannon Shae Montoya is VP, Head of Global B2B Marketing, Sponsorships and Events at Yahoo, where she has spent over four years building experiential marketing programmes from the NY Giants to Cannes Lions. Her operating thesis is simple: brands are felt, not just seen, and an experience creates a memory in a way no ad can.
“Nine out of ten US internet consumers come to Yahoo monthly. 700 Yahoo alumni yodelled together at Cannes.”
Shannon Shae Montoya is VP, Head of Global B2B Marketing, Sponsorships and Events at Yahoo. She joined Yahoo in September 2021 and has expanded her remit to encompass global B2B marketing, sponsorships, and events. She is also an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Tisch Institute for Sports Management, Media and Business, where she has taught since 2014.
Shannon’s career began in sports, with graduate work at NYU and a connection through family friend Coach Tom Coughlin that led to a role with the New York Giants at the time of the MetLife Stadium opening. She describes being part of a Superbowl-winning team as her reference point for what a genuine winning culture feels like. From sports she moved into experiential and trade marketing at Momentum Worldwide, then Time Inc. and Meredith, then Verizon Media before the Yahoo rebranding brought her into her current remit.
At Yahoo, her most-cited activation is Motel Yahoo at Cannes Lions 2025, celebrating the company’s 30th anniversary. The activation turned the Martinez beach into a retro motel: a search bar as the bar, Yahoo Mail as a front-desk mailbox, Yahoo Sports as miniature golf. The alumni happy hour drew over 700 former Yahoos who yodelled together in one place. Shannon describes the Yahoo-San Francisco 49ers partnership, where the stadium erupts in the Yahoo Yodel every time the 49ers score a touchdown, as the clearest illustration of what sponsorship with cultural integration looks like versus logo placement.
“A memory is a past event that shapes future decisions.”
“Relevance gets you in the room. Without both, you are just present.”
Shannon’s framework for experiential marketing starts from the science of memory rather than the mechanics of events. A memory, by definition, shapes future behaviour. The job of a live experience is not to create an impression but to create the kind of emotionally resonant moment that a person recalls when they are about to make a decision. Relevance, backed by data and audience insight, earns the opportunity. Resonance, the emotional quality of the experience itself, is what converts the opportunity into a lasting association. Motel Yahoo at Cannes was designed from that framework: every element of the activation was built to trigger a specific emotional response tied to Yahoo’s 30-year place in people’s lives.
“Every time the 49ers score, the entire stadium yodels. Yahoo is woven into the fabric of the game.”
The Yahoo-49ers partnership is Shannon’s primary illustration of what sponsorship integration looks like when done at the highest level. The yodel is not a brand moment that happens in the stadium. It is the stadium. When 70,000 people yodel together because their team scored, Yahoo is part of that collective joy. The partnership was built from a shared presence in Silicon Valley, Yahoo’s original home ground, and has evolved into something that neither party could manufacture independently. Shannon’s view is that any partnership worth pursuing should be genuinely additive: it should bring something to both audiences that neither side could provide alone.
“AI gets the relevance right. The human piece is resonance: what people carry with them for years.”
Shannon’s view of AI in experiential marketing is collaborative rather than competitive. Data and AI tools help identify the right audience, the right moment, and the right context for an activation before any creative brief is written. That is the relevance layer. But the design of an experience, the choice of what a person will feel when they walk into a room, what they will remember, what they will tell someone else about, remains irreducibly human. The two are not in tension. AI makes the relevance faster and more accurate. Human creativity makes the resonance real.
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